Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus and the German Novella

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus is a novella that shows the potentially dangerous consequences of going against society in the pursuit of love. But first and foremost, it is a story, and that’s what makes it fun to read. I’d like to make the case for that “fun” factor today, while still providing a summary of the plot and an analysis of what makes the story interesting from an “I’m going to have to write an essay on this for uni” perspective.

Theodor Storm and the Novella

The German word “Novelle” can be easily translated as “novella”, but you lose a lot of cultural associations that way. Theodor Storm, whose work is as cool as his name, was a master at the art of writing novellas and also one of the genre’s great theorists. He explained the power of the novella by connecting it to tragic drama when he said “the novella is the sister of drama”. Unlike a novel, which is typically (experimental works discounted) burdened by a large cast of characters and multiple subplots, the novella in 19th century Germany is lean and focused on a single plotline and a few characters, much like a traditional tragic drama. And unlike a short story, the novella has enough time to develop its characters and plots from fleeting impressions and moments into something with a complex plot that can grab and hold our attention.

A photo of Theodor Storm
Theodor Storm

Storm himself was born in 1817 and lived out most of his life in what is now northern Germany but during his lifetime changed from Danish to German hands. He wrote novellas and some beautiful poems, almost all of them taking his coastal homeland for their setting. This already puts him in stark contrast to the earlier German Romantics, who seemed to forget that Germany had sea as well as mountains and forests. His most famous works are Immensee and The Rider on the White Horse (Der Schimmelreiter), though Aquis Submersus is not far behind.

Storm’s tales are symbolic and often feature magic, which shows the influence of fairy tales. In their heavy symbolism Storm’s tales also conform to Paul Heyse’s Falcon Theory (Falkentheorie), which states that novellas ought to have a symbolic leitmotif that repeats throughout the work like a spine. We’ll see how this works out in Aquis Submersus.

Telling a Story – Framing the Narrative in Aquis Submersus

The thing that I like about Aquis Submersus, and Storm’s work in general, is that it has an unmistakable and yet undefinable quality of being a story to it. What does that word mean? Walter Benjamin did his best to explain what a story was in contrast to a novel. But for me, Storm’s stories feel like the sort of tales that are told by the fireside in some cold and dreary cottage. They are designed to bring mystery and wonder into a merciless world. They remind me of my own childhood, growing up in the far north of Scotland. The Rider on the White Horse even begins with that very idea – the narrator, a young boy, is told one layer of that story’s frame narrative by his grandmother, while he is playing around with an old newspaper in front of the fireplace in their cottage.

Aquis Submersus also uses a frame narrative. The unnamed outer layer narrator begins by describing his childhood visits to the house of the village priest, where he and the pastor’s son play outside in the grass by a pond. But they also sometimes investigate the church itself, which is an old building that the narrator says “excited my fantasies”. Inside that building there is a painting of a young, drowned boy, and underneath it there are the letters “C. P. A. S.”. Like any good 19th century lad, the narrator knows Latin and quickly determines that A. S. is “aquis submersus” – died from drowning. But he and his friend struggle to work out C. P. – giving the readers their first mystery. The narrator suggests it means “culpa patris” – “through the father’s guilt” – but the priest himself doesn’t know and can’t confirm the narrator’s suspicions.

Years go by, and the narrator finds himself attracted by an old house in his town. When he goes in he discovers another painting by the same artist, once more showing the drowned boy. When he asks about the painting the house’s inhabitants say it belonged to a member of the family from long ago, and offer to show him the belongings of the painter. These turn out to be, in the words of the owner, “just some old scribblings; there’s nothing of value in them”. But our narrator is overjoyed, and in his eagerness to learn what secrets lie within these books he doesn’t even leave the house but reads them right in that very room. And it is here that the main story begins.

The significance of the frame narrative device is here that it heightens the feeling that what we are reading is just a story. It mimics the format by which we ourselves here stories in the real world – organically and often through chance occurrences, so that we build ourselves a narrative out of the separate pieces. Just like the narrator we learn about a mystery, and then only gradually do we see it resolved. The fact that we have a resolution, the fact that the narrator stumbles upon the books – these are unrealistic, perhaps, but we accept them as we accept the corner-cutting and rearranging that takes place every time an old story is recounted. We know that not everything we hear is to be believed, but we want to hear anyway, and decide for ourselves what is real and what may well be fiction.

The Plot – “Just some old scribblings”

The story of Aquis Submersus concerns an orphan, Johannes, who finds financial support from a family of German nobles. The son of the family, the appropriately named Wulf, resents Johannes because he is receiving what Wulf considers his inheritance. It gets even worse when Johannes falls in love with Wulf’s sister, Katherina – a love that, in the middle of the 17th century when the novella takes place, cannot be legitimised through marriage due to the differences between their classes.

Time passes and Johannes leaves to become a well-known painter in Holland. When he returns, five years after his last meeting with the family, he finds that “the good times have passed”. As he approaches the family’s castle he is attacked by Wulf’s new bulldogs, and he also learns that the father has died, leaving the hostility of Wulf towards him without check. But there is another tragedy approaching – Katherina is preparing to be given away in marriage, likely to a neighbour, Kurt, who is noted for his brutality. As if to rub salt into the wound, Wulf demands Johannes paint his sister’s picture before she goes, so that her memory will always be in the house.

Johannes paints Katherina in a room filled with old paintings of her relatives, including one woman who reminds him of Katherina’s mother while also terrifying him. It turns out that the picture is of an ancient relative who cursed her own daughter, leading to the daughter’s death in a pond nearby. The reason was that the daughter didn’t want to marry the person chosen for her – and Katherina admits that she feels the curse is on her too. But there is a way out, and Katherina gives Johannes a letter to pass on to an aunt who might be able to spirit her away. Unfortunately, though, it seems that Kurt has put spies out, because when Johannes returns, the task complete, Wulf and Kurt together set the dogs on him, and Johannes is only able to escape by sneaking into Katherina’s window and spending the night with her.

The next day he must move on, expecting never to see her again. But a few years later he finds himself tasked with painting a priest in a local village, and he heads out there. The priest’s son is a small boy, also called Johannes, and at first his mother is unknown. But a series of events lead to Johannes the painter learning the identity of the mother, and thus begins the novella’s tragic conclusion.

Drama’s Sister – Tragedy in Aquis Submersus

The mother is none other than Katherina. Kurt has married someone else, leaving Wulf to dispose of his sister by leaving her with the priest – a good and kind man. Since Katherina was pregnant – with Johannes’ own child – the man’s decision to marry her saved her from ignominy and shame. But when Johannes sees her again, all thoughts of the public and their potential reactions go out of the window. She is outside with her child when Johannes catches her, and though she says she wants to keep the young boy – he’s only about four – in sight, Johannes refuses to let her go. He has waited too long. There is a moment of bliss between the two old lovers, and then it is shattered with a cry. The child has drowned, and the priest, now returned from work and knowing the full story, doesn’t let Johannes see the result.

These moments towards the end of the book demonstrate the way that Aquis Submersus is very much a tragic work extracted from the same vein as tragic theatre. A crescendo of happiness – what we might consider to be well-earned by the travails of both characters – is destroyed in a way that seems at first completely unfair. But when we ask ourselves why such suffering has taken place, explanations do appear. With each of the great tragic figures in literature, there are reasons for their fates.

But what makes Aquis Submersus exciting from an interpretive perspective – not just in essays, but when you listen to the story by the fireside – is that there is no one dominant explanation. Does Johannes’ child die because of his father’s impatience and selfishness? Or does he die because Johannes is going against society and God by trying to be with someone from a different social class? As one of the servants in the castle says early on in the story, “we ought to stay wherever the Lord God has chosen to set us down”. Is it a kind of hubris for him to want to be with Katherina? And why does Katherina have to suffer, when she tried to escape Johannes and watch over the boy? And why must the boy himself die? Unanswered questions like these form the tragic component of Aquis Submersus, where fate itself is inscrutable.

The Leitmotifs and Symbols of Aquis Submersus

Aquis Submersus is a highly symbolic work in addition to being a tragic one. Throughout the story objects and images repeat in the same way that a leitmotif repeats in certain types of music. Two prominent symbols are the castle and its grounds, and paintings. The castle and grounds are first introduced in the outer section of the frame narrative. There, they are completely in disrepair and the hedgerows are empty and “ghostly”. What we see in the inner narrative is the decline to this point play out. At first, while the father of the family is alive, things are well, but by the time he and the older servants are dead Wulf becomes isolated there. It is only by using the lush vegetation of the castle walls that Johannes is able to spend the night with Katerina. But with her banishment the place grows barren and infertile.

A picture of a German castle
A German castle, perhaps like the one of Aquis Submersus

Our first introduction to the central story of Aquis Submersus comes through a painting. The inscription is the source of the mystery – clearly there was a reason to commemorate the death of a child, but what? The idea that paintings are a source of memory continues when Johannes is tasked with painting Katherina prior to her departure from her family’s home. But the memories located in paintings, it soon becomes clear, aren’t always positive. The initial painting serves as a warning about the dangers of all-consuming love, while the portrait of the distant ancestor works to bring knowledge and memory of past misdeeds down through the generations as a curse. Johannes’ own career as a painter is marked by a desire to become famous because then the class barriers between him and Katerina will be no more. But in painting his dead son, Johannes finally performs an act of redemption.

There are other symbols too, such as birds and the water of the very title. But these two above should give an idea of how Storm weaves symbolism into the narrative and uses it to reinforce central themes. The castle comes right from traditional medieval works and their ideas of chastity, while paintings and their recorded images have always had occasional negative undertones, as if it is not an image but a soul that is trapped within them. Some things, of course, it is better not to remember. A painting keeps us from moving on.

Conclusion

I read Aquis Submersus both because I knew it was on my reading list for next year and because I’ve read and enjoyed Storm’s stories before. I was glad that this one didn’t disappoint. As with all of these German novellas, the formal aspects of Aquis Submersus are pretty interesting, letting you talk about various novella-theories and also how the story fits into Benjamin’s conception of storytelling too. But more importantly, the tale is fun because of the story itself, which is suspenseful and exciting. And at only eighty-or-so pages, it’s hard not to recommend it.

For more Storm, I have a summary of Immensee here. I’ve also translated some of Storm’s poetry, which you can read here.

Picture of a castle comes from KlausFoehl and is used under [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Sympathy, Sadness, and Disappointment in Dostoevsky’s The Double

It was through Dostoevsky that I first came to Russian literature, after a winter reading The Brothers Karamazov that changed my world and the course of my life. And for a while he was my favourite writer and the only person I could say I’d read nearly everything of. But once my own Russian skills were good enough to read him in the original, the disappointment was crushing. In English, with the kind help of a translator or, in some cases, two, Dostoevsky’s Russian can be hammered into a vaguely readable shape. But in the original, there is no such help, and the truth of it is that Dostoevsky is among the worst stylists ever to be elevated to the Canon. Random words, commas, ellipses – Dostoevsky’s writing in The Double is as mad as his subject matter, the mysterious (apparent) duplication of a civil servant.

A drawing of Fyodor Dostoevsky while he was younger.
A young Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Double was written and published in 1846 – before Dostoevsky suffered the imprisonment and exile that changed his life and made him the author we know today

The Double is not Dostoevsky’s best book, by any stretch, unless you’re Vladimir Nabokov (and he’s not the best judge anyway). It was also written before his mock-execution and years of imprisonment which led to the spiritual conversation that we have to thank for his mature work. Still, it’s on my Cambridge reading list because it’s shamelessly derivative of Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, which I’ve looked at here (“The Nose”) and here (“Notes of a Madman” and “Nevsky Prospekt”). Though Dostoevsky is very much influenced by Gogol – “We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’” is a famous quote attributed to him – The Double is also Dostoevsky’s own work, and bears his own stamps too. In this case it doesn’t make for a good book, but it does at least make for an interesting one.

Translations from the Russian are my own.

A Brief and Rough Summary of the Plot

The Double tells the story of a few days in the life of one Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a poor civil servant in early 19th century Saint Petersburg. On the day the story begins he decides to spend most of his savings on hiring a fancy carriage and a serious livery for his servant Petrushka, all so that he might look better off than he actually is. He then visits his new doctor, who he had already visited earlier that week for an unspecified illness. This doctor suggests that Golyadkin, who is introverted and has paranoia – even within the first chapter he feels he’s being watched – go out and socialize and thus prevent himself having a breakdown. Golyadkin, however, doesn’t leave until he has gone on an unprovoked rant about the “enemies” who conspire against him.

The extravagant spending is because Golyadkin is going, that evening, to the birthday party of Klara, the daughter of a more senior civil servant. But when he arrives, he is unable to enter the main hall – he’s too scared, and ends up just watching from a hiding spot until someone approaches and his cover is blown. He goes up to Klara, but finds himself tongue-tied, and she is led away from him – it is not the first time he’s bothered her. Ashamed, Golyadkin heads home in a snowstorm, and it is only then – a third of the way through The Double – that we actually meet the double himself, also called Golyadkin, first glimpsed as a figure in the night. Both of them are heading to Golyadkin’s house, and the hero offers to let the other Golyadkin stay over.

The next day at work Golyadkin begins to feel a great deal of confusion, because he is the only person who recognises the double as being his double, in name and figure. Every other worker doesn’t notice the complete copying of him. That evening Golyadkin and the double, who appears meek and embarrassed, have a long and heartfelt chat over tea – though only Golyadkin senior appears to actually speak at length – and then they go to bed, having sworn eternal brotherhood. But by the next day things are going terribly wrong for the kind-hearted Golyadkin. At work he finds the double is finding all sorts of official favour, and all of his old colleagues are turning against him. And what is worst of all, the double himself scarcely acknowledges the kindness that Golyadkin had rendered him the night before. Isolated, Golyadkin leaves in shame.

Next begins a flurry of letter writing, miscommunications – Golyadkin struggles to say anything in plain language and has various annoying verbal tics – and brief but painful meetings with the double. Nightmares keep Golyadkin from sleeping, but the next day he “discovers” in his pocket a letter from Klara, where she claims that only he can save her from her family, and that he must meet her outside her house at around 2am that day. Buoyant, Golyadkin has another meeting with his double, then eventually winds up outside Klara’s house, where a grand ball is ongoing. Though he tries again to hide, he is discovered, and his double comes and asks him to come inside. There he meets the doctor again, and is whisked away into the night, heading for an asylum.

Dostoevsky’s Touch – Sympathy in The Double

What Gogol manages in forty or so pages Dostoevsky needs almost two hundred in The Double for, and the reason for this, charitably speaking, is that Dostoevsky cares about Golyadkin, and wishes we did too. That is to say, the extra pages are all designed to make him deserve our sympathy, and have absolutely nothing to do with Dostoevsky’s uncontrollable verbiage… In considering Golyadkin as sympathetically portrayed, it’s best to compare him with Gogol’s best known Petersburg hero, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin of “The Overcoat”. In that story, there is a moment where poor Akaky Akakievich is being teased by his coworkers, only for one of them to have a sudden epiphany, in which they recognise for the first time that Akaky Akakievich is their “brother”. But this is just one moment, and for the rest of the story Akaky Akakievich is more the butt of a joke than sympathetic.

Dostoevsky takes us much more into poor Golyadkin’s head. We may not learn about his family, but we learn about the state of his soul. We are taken around endless laps of his repetitive thinking, eavesdrop on conversations he hopes will happen but never do, and hear again and again his various tics, notably the Russian “deskat’”, which means “well,” or “I guess” or nothing really whatsoever. By taking us into his head, we also get a better sense of the challenges he faces in life. When Akaky Akakievich has melon rinds thrown at him we can’t help but laugh, but in The Double we are too close to Golyadkin to idly watch as he suffers. His anxiety becomes, strangely, ours, just as his enemies become our own. And when his madness takes over we feel we’re mad too.

A painting of Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol, whose influence is found throughout The Double. His Petersburg Tales are in my view much more fun to read than Dostoevsky’s novel, but that’s not to say The Double doesn’t have things going for it. Dostoevsky’s sympathy for Golyadkin is one such thing. Gogol didn’t care as much.

Gogol’s Influence – Varieties of Madness

The Double is marked by strangeness right from the very first page, where Golyadkin’s room seems oddly filled with red and green objects. I read green as indicating envy here – for not only does it mark valuable objects, it notably is the colour of the briefcase belonging to Golyadkin’s superior which the double carries around important documents in. Golyadkin’s envy, perhaps, turns the case green. The Double also enjoys focusing on time. Golyadkin is always asking what time it is, but much as with Gogol’s Madman in the story of the same name his grasp of time soon collapses. Once he has received his letter from Klara and is standing outside in the snow, waiting for her, he has a moment of crisis:

“And what was more, maybe it was the case that the letter was written yesterday, and that it just didn’t reach me on time, and it didn’t reach me precisely because Petrushka – and what a rogue he is! – got into a mix. Or perhaps it was written tomorrow, which is to say, that I… that tomorrow I will need to have done everything, that is to say I should be waiting with the carriage then…”

The letter, of course, is also imagined, for it disappears from Golyadkin’s pockets as soon as he’s read it, much as with the “letters” exchanged between the dogs of “Notes of a Madman”. We also have Gogol to thank for the linguistic madness of Golyadkin – the way, that is, that he just keeps talking and talking, yet can never seem to convey anything akin to sense to those who are listening. I suppose it is similar to one whose brain is being destroyed by dementia or cancer and can no longer realise that what they are saying has no meaning.  

And somewhere within this all there is a religious madness too. Dostoevsky takes from Gogol a number of small untranslatable signs indicating the presence of the devil through the whole text – for example, in both the Russian word for “black” (chyorniy) and for “four” (“chetyre”) there are most of the letters for the Russian word “Chyort”, meaning a devil. Meanwhile, Golyadkin sees himself a heroic figure, a saviour (like Christ) in contrast to the evil double, who he calls “Judas” and “treacherous” several times. And this ties in with the theme of sympathy too, for we alone pity Golyadkin in his delusion while the rest of society casts him out as a lunatic. Unfortunately for Golyadkin, his own truth and view of things is not one he, linguistically, is capable of sharing, and as language fails him ever more, his delusions only get worse and worse.

Modernity in The Double

But the thing that I’ve found most interesting, reading through The Double this time round, is the way that it predicts a lot of the tensions and difficulties faced by the average office worker (and, I should add, the average student) in this day and age. I do not mean that Golyadkin has to deal with the printer not working so much as the challenges of a hostile bureaucracy, inexplicable social codes and endless humiliating grovelling before his superiors, and so on. His anxiety is in a large part the anxiety of one suffering from imposter syndrome – he’s frightened that people are watching him – and, indeed, one of the things that the double does to further unhinge him is tell Golyadkin that his paperwork is covered with stains (and thus embarrassing). The double himself appears to embody Golyadkin’s fears of his own inadequacy – he is popular, talkative, and successful.

But he is also young. In the narrative he is often referred to as Golyadkin-the-younger, and the way he completely replaces – including in the minds of his former friends – Golyadkin-the-elder I think expresses a frightening (for some) truth of the modern workplace – that loyalty and time count for less than they once used to, and that now all that matters is being talented at sucking-up and appearing to be organised. What Golyadkin-the-elder witnesses is a collapse of his worldview, as the simple values of working hard by which he had lived are proved inadequate for reaching his goal – Klara and positive attention from his superiors. Reality as he had understood it thus collapses, and with it Golyadkin’s sanity does too.

In connection with this I also can’t help but find that Golyadkin’s attachment to his work, as is the case with Gogol’s protagonists, is a major reason for the ease of his collapse. We find a man with “no life”, someone without real friends, who sees love as a miraculous escape, fall into madness the moment he is rejected by that love and his accompanying delusions about the value of his labours shatter. I suppose Golyadkin and these other characters serve as warnings to those of us who invest too much of ourselves into one thing, because the moment those hopes and dreams fail, our entire identity can too. So there’s certainly room for a Marxist critique around here.

A copy of my Russian version of the Double
My Russian copy of The Double. I wanted to enjoy this book as much as I’d enjoyed Gogol’s stories in the original. But, man, Dostoevsky’s style just doesn’t make for fun reading.

Conclusion – Problems and “Problems” in The Double

Some problems within a work can make it interesting for the critics who come afterwards, keen to carve out an interpretation of their own using its ambiguities; other problems make the work unenjoyable and leave people unwilling to pick it up again once they’ve finished. The Double has plenty of the former type, but a disappointing number of the latter sort too. It is far too long, for one thing – Gogol could pack into stories of thirty or forty pages what Dostoevsky has managed here in nearly two hundred. And then there is the language… I’ve read this in English, I’ve read this in Russian, and at neither time have I enjoyed it. Repetitions, confusions, illogic – madness does not make for fun reading.

I can forgive Dostoevsky’s style when it is conveying passionate belief, whether Ivan Karamazov’s or Ippolit’s or Raskolnikov’s – there, it seems to represent a kind of unrestrained self-belief worth admiring. But here Golyadkin is pitiable only. It’s hard to enjoy the way the text makes us aware of that. Still, there’s lots of cool stuff going on, which at the very least mean it shouldn’t be too painful to write an essay on The Double. My feeling now that I’ve been through the whole of the so-called Petersburg Tales is that one of the most interesting things uniting them is their early hostility to industrialisation and bureaucratization in Russia. All of these protagonists, working dead-end jobs under abstruse rules and regulations, eerily prophecy the challenges many of us face in the modern workplace and university. It’s hard not to feel there’s a bit of Golyadkin in all of us.

Nabokov’s Professor Pnin and the Pain of the Past

Pnin is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written at the same time as his more famous Lolita. But Pnin is, to my mind at least, a much more enjoyable book than Lolita is. It is helped in this by its protagonist, the lovely and lovable Professor Tim Pnin, an American of Imperial Russian extraction like Nabokov himself, but one whose success in falling into American culture, his naturalization notwithstanding, has not been nearly so successful.

What this leads to is a series of comic misunderstandings and slapstick humour, bad accents and worse grammar, all of which ultimately make Pnin an almost light-hearted and innocently enjoyable book. But beneath the surface there is an unmistakable note of sadness, a mourning for the past that Pnin has left behind him in his homeland and is unable to forget altogether, and a sense of narrative sympathy towards all those who history treats as pawns or playthings of its grand designs. Once the laughter has stopped, then it’s time for the tears.

A photo of Vladimir Nabokov looking ready for a fight
Our author, Vladimir Nabokov. Pnin is in many ways similar to Nabokov. Both were Russians of noble birth who ended up in America in academic institutions, but Nabokov is a far more cunning man than dear Pnin ever could be, and much better at English

Tim Pnin’s Origins and Ancestors

Let’s begin with Pnin. Pnin is a Russian from a good family of minor nobility, not that that matters when bombs start flying in Saint Petersburg and the rest of the Russian Empire. He escapes to Europe, his family die, and when Hitler gains power and starts using it Pnin makes the journey to America, where his Russian wife (but met in Europe) leaves him almost at once. There, with the help of old-world knowledge and the network of fellow intelligent Russians that soon formed in the United States, Pnin ends up at Waindell College, a small university in a small university town, and settles down to teach and become a real American.

We first meet him on the train, because his life is one of movement, often involuntary. And we meet him on the wrong train because he is a fool. He has used a timetable that is five years out of date. In this moment the problem that is doomed to plague Pnin for the whole book is made clear – he is out of touch, and doesn’t seem to know it. As a result of all this, and his poor English and worse social skills, he becomes a comic figure in the vein of Gogol’s civil servants and Chekhov’s banal mediocrities. He struggles with teaching and academic intrigues, with finding places to stay, and even with driving. And wherever he goes and whatever he does, somehow memories of the past he has lost find a way of returning to him, for better or for worse.

Poor Pnin – Sympathy and Comedy

It is perhaps as a teacher that Pnin is at his most comedic. He is not the proud leader of a Russian department but rather slotted in, through academic jiu-jitsu, as part of the German Department in some kind of comparative role, and he has only a few students at the best of times. He is not a good teacher, by any stretch of the imagination, but he is one of those who we tend to look back on fondly. I know that I remember the teachers with heart and humour far better than I do the cold, bespectacled men who got me to Cambridge and then vanished into an almost-robotic silence in my memory. Pnin not like them – he is a fun teacher, beloved for “those unforgettable digressions of his”, and “what his listeners politely surmised was Russian humour”.

Against his pupils, brimming with ignorance and at best a secondhand passion for such books as Anna Karamazov, Pnin espouses in broken English the love that he cannot truly hope to translate, and fails dramatically at teaching anything akin to grammar or vocabulary. Poor Pnin at first veers uncomfortably between being the permanent butt of a joke and someone we can at least extend some sympathy to, but by the end of the book he has managed to acquire a sort of heroic dignity. Not that that stops him from regularly falling downstairs, mistaking one professor for another, and various other mishaps.

Pnin and his novel seem to bring over to American literature that very Russian mood of “smekh skvoz’ slyozi”, or “laughter through tears”, where comedy can at any moment transform into the deepest sadness and pity.

One example of this is Pnin’s purchase of a football for the son of his ex-wife and her second husband. Viktor is coming to stay with Pnin at his ex-wife’s behest. At first the whole idea is comic – Pnin goes to the store, has some difficulty with the American conception of “football” (“No, no,” said Pnin, “I do not wish an egg or, for example, a torpedo. I want a simple football ball. Round!”), but eventually gets the soccer ball he wants to give out of kindness alone. Yet when Viktor actually arrives, he reveals, unwittingly, that he doesn’t like sport, and Pnin’s mood is as deflated just as much as any ball could be, and he throws the ball out of the window when Viktor isn’t looking. The final scene of the chapter has the ball rolling through a windy night, alone and prey to the elements. Poor Pnin.

History’s Pnin-pong Ball

But all this pain is most in evidence whenever the novel deals with the theme of history itself and its effects upon the individuals who get in its way. I noticed that each chapter begins, more or less, with comedy, but ends with bleak rumination and the lonely exploration of Pnin’s memories. Pnin and his fellow Russian nobles left Russia under threat of death, and tried, some with success, some without, to establish themselves in Europe, and then when that dream failed due to Nazism, they headed West once again, to America. Some died in the struggle. Pnin’s first love was among those who were put to death in the concentration camps – she was a person who through the lens of memory becomes a symbol of a more innocent time, of peace and honesty as opposed to the serial adultery of his actual wife.

One recounted memory that I remember particularly strongly is of Pnin, the girl, and a few other young Russians putting on a play in an aristocratic estate in one of the Baltic parts of the Russian Empire. We don’t see the play in any great detail, but the image of its performance is a strong one. For those Russians, in the period of their youth before the Revolutions came, life was merely a game, a play, with no true conflict and no chance that history might turn against them and scatter them like leaves in the wind. Of course, their attitude towards life is not something to be applauded, but the tragedy that took place is something that within the context of their own lives ought to be lamented. Their peace turned out to be only a dream, and they were ill-prepared for the reality.

A picture of a country estate owned by the Nabokov family. In such a place Pnin would have put on his play
One of the Nabokovs’ estates in Russia, lost in the Revolution. In such a place it is easy to relax and believe that the world will sort itself out, and the most stressful part of the day can be just putting on a play. The play Pnin was in would have taken place in a similar such location.

What I liked was that Nabokov doesn’t stop with just criticising the Soviets and the Germans, the low-hanging fruit of the Second World War. He also suggests, with ever more urgency as the book goes on, that McCarthyism in America is another such dangerous and hateful trend. Pnin’s unpopularity as a teacher is, yes, partially due to the fact that he can’t exactly teach, but it’s also increasingly due to a cultural shift that sees everything “Russian” as being “commie” and dangerous. Even though he has escaped to America, Pnin can’t escape the hands of fools who wish to turn ordinary people’s lives into tools for political games. We as readers can only hope that he and the other Russians escape the worst years of American repressions intact.

Language in Pnin

Nabokov is a master wordsmith – everybody knows as much – but Nabokov’s language in Pnin is also, surprisingly perhaps, another place where sympathy can be located. Pnin is introduced as something of a fool when he speaks, spouting Russianisms and using idioms wrongly. At first we laugh, because such moments are indeed very funny. When he discovers that he is on the wrong train at the novel’s beginning we hear: ““Important lecture!” cried Pnin. “What to do? It is a catastroph!”” Having spent a lot of time among Russians with varying levels of English, I find Nabokov’s portrayal leaves nothing to be desired. As the novel goes on, Pnin’s English continues to be serviceable but broken, Russified, and occasionally plain wrong. We laugh and continue to think of Pnin as an affable old fool, as out of touch linguistically as he is culturally.

But then, when Pnin is at a retreat for fellow Russians in the American countryside, Nabokov takes his foot off the breaks and Pnin begins to speak. He does not lurch in broken sentences, but words – intelligent, reasonable, words – flow warmly from his mouth. And suddenly we realise that the fool we thought we saw, the bumbler who can scarcely speak, is not the real Pnin, but just the shadow that he is capable of translating. And we feel sad for him, so often isolated from his true self. He talks of beauty and of literature with wit and character, and we can only wish that his English were good enough to get the words out at other times – for his students’ sakes, at the very least.

Another moment that truly humanises poor old Pnin comes at the very end of the novel, when the narrator is relating Pnin’s courtship of his future ex-wife, an artistic young poet who is a member of fashionable social circles where Pnin would never end up in a million years. And yet Pnin writes her a letter where he bares his soul and asks for her hand. We see Pnin as he really is, not barred by language or custom – we see him free and in love. “I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything… I may not achieve happiness, but I know I shall do everything to make you happy”. The language is poetic, the sentiment heroic. This is the true Pnin.

Conclusion

Nabokov is famous for his formal trickery, unreliable narrators, and gameplaying, and in Pnin this is not limited to bad puns alone. The book ends with one of those classic reversals of postmodern ingenuity that no doubt will leave an eventual rereading of the book all the richer by undermining a lot of the narrative that has gone before. In other words, the ending does cheapen the rest of the book, no matter how much it does give you things to think about. To each their own, but personally I’m content just to enjoy the rest of the book without overthinking the implications of the closing pages. A second time through, no doubt, I’ll see everything a little differently. But for now, I’ll save myself the trouble.

Pnin is a short book, which makes it easy to recommend. However masterful its prose, I enjoy how much attention poor Professor Pnin receives. Like him, the book is funny and a little twee. But also like him, underneath the bumbling exterior there lurk depths that are worth looking into, and reveal a sadness and isolation that lend Pnin’s story a tragic note. Alongside the laughs there are also the tears that come from an understanding of another’s suffering, a suffering that until we have taken a trip through Pnin’s world may well have been completely unknown to us. The book summons up sympathy, and that’s a very valuable thing, especially in our modern world, where history continues daily creating playthings of individual lives. Perhaps you have already met your Pnin – perhaps your meeting is still to come. But now, at least, you’ll be ready for him.

For my rather more lukewarm response to Nabokov’s Strong Opinions, follow this link.